When George Lai of Portland, Oregon, took his toddler son to a pediatrician last summer for a checkup, the doctor noticed a little splinter in the child’s palm. “He must have gotten it between the front door and the car,” Lai later recalled, and the child wasn’t complaining. The doctor grabbed a pair of forceps — aka tweezers — and pulled out the splinter in “a second,” Lai said. That brief tug was transformed into a surgical billing code: Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code 10120, “incision and removal of a foreign body, subcutaneous” — at a cost of $414.

  • lordnikon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    14 hours ago

    This is a good point. The Doc could have just put a one sentence in the kids chart without a second thought and that triggered a billing admin to code it for maximum stupidity.